Too hard to handle

This morning I went shopping for a shirt & started thinking about how the material wealth American believers enjoy compares to what folks living in Third World countries can expect.

A majority of Americans expect a job with a 40-hour work week, a new car every 3 years, the chance to buy and own a house, safe food, prompt health care, a comfortable pension for retirement and a life expectancy approaching almost 80 years.

Third World Citizens work whatever job they can get, have never seen a new car or made a telephone call.

Seems hard to understand why we were born into so much, while believers in the Third World were born into so little.

Maybe we shrug and think, "Wow that's gotta be pretty hard, living with so little."

With so many blessings it's sometimes easy to forget where our wealth came from ... and what about the suggestion that we keep God's commandments and honor him with our offerings?

Naaaah that's just too hard, living with so much.

Isn't there one thing we can all agree on?

There are a few things we can all agree are true.

The sun is yellow.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
The sun is directly overhead at noon.
The moon comes out at night.
The North Star is the brightest star in the nighttime sky.
A compass needle points north.
Heavy objects fall faster than light objects.
The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line.
Days get shorter in winter and longer in summer.
There is no gravity in outer space.


But all of those things are FALSE, so we'll have to agree on something else.

Blithering

What's Blithering? Blithering means "Blogging on Friday."

I'm still a big Gator fan ...
The SC Department of Natural Resources will issue 1000 alligator hunting permits for this year's Sept 13- Oct 11 season. Hunters will be allowed to kill just one gator, which must be more than 4 feet in length.
www.dnrsc.gov

Wow. Wish that could be incorporated into Fox's new Lake Hartwell reality TV show.


Pitcher this
Analogies are illustrations. Analogies are not postulates, facts or truths. Finding fault with an analogy only dismisses the analogy, not the point:

Let's say you're trying to explain the concept of "water pitcher" to a visitor from another planet. Since you're having trouble communicating in Xkrueg, it seems like a good idea to draw a picture of a water pitcher and suggest, "A water pitcher looks like this."

Then an earthly critic comes along and shrugs, "But YOUR picture doesn't hold water."

Moral: You can't prove (or disprove) a point using analogies. Duh.

Super Bowl Insider
You know the scenario: It's fourth and goal on the One with :06 left on the Super Bowl clock and your team is trailing by 5. So you grab your ball cap because twisting it around backward virtually guarantees victory.

Or you cross and un-cross your legs six times during the final time-out (because your team needs six points to win). Come on, we all do it. Don't we?

In the meantime, ever wondered what the QB is saying in the huddle? Probably something like this:

"OK guys, we trained in the off-season, sacrificed during spring training, played hard during the season and fought our hearts out during the play-offs to finally get to this point.

"Now let's all give 110% ... and just hope our lucky slob sitting in his recliner in Des Moines is watching and remembers to rub his belly counter-clockwise 3 times so we can take this one to the bank. OK on three, break."

I'm quite sure.

Any point asking why?
I woke up around 1:30 AM the other night and couldn't get back to sleep. So I turned on the TV and surfed through the satellite sky until I found a documentary that caught my attention.

In a nutshell, the show's premise was that Christ was a fictional creation and never actually existed: that everything we know about Christ from the gospels was "borrowed" directly from Egyptian myths (some dude named Horace) that have been traced back to 2500 BC.

Is it me, or does it seem like suddenly there's tons of documentaries and "scholarship" coming out to "prove" that either the gospels are fiction, or worse, that Christ himself was a liar.

Wonder why I haven't been seeing as much attention and "scholarship" devoted to Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard or the Dali Lama.

the largest number in the universe

-from Wiki:

"Graham's number, named after Ronald Graham, is a large number often described as the largest finite number that has ever been seriously used in a mathematical proof.

"Guinness World Records even listed Graham's number as the World Champion largest number. Graham's number is much larger than other well known large numbers such as a googol and a googolplex, and even larger than Skewes' number and Moser's number, other well-known large numbers.

"Indeed, there is no concise way to write Graham's number, or any reasonable approximation using conventional mathematical operators. Even power towers (of the form ) are useless for this purpose. It can be most easily notated by recursive means using Knuth's up-arrow notation or the Hyper operator.

G = g₆₄ where ,

-- --- --

Hmmm. Thought I'd seen several church covenants that tacked on enough man-made rules and legalisms to make Graham's Number pale in comparison.

Blittering?

Has anybody already come up with the idea of "Blittering"?

Blittering would be limiting blog posts to 140 words or less. Instead of 140 paragraphs (or pages) per post; guilty.

There, I did it in thirty-six. (104 remaining)

"... and Lord, please help all those other people, too."

"Lord, before I forget, please help all the Christians living in those poor other countries. Please help them not to die of diseases or starve to death or be killed in wars.

"Please help them have clothes and be strong in their suffering. And if it's your will, let please let their children be OK but if they get sick, please don't let them suffer too much before they die.

"Lord I know they don't speak English or look like I do, but that's not their fault. That doesn't make any difference to me so if you get a chance, please do what you can. It wouldn't take very much.

"I guess that's all I can think of for now. Amen.

"Oh PS. You already know this but please get our pastor straightened out. Make sure he keeps both feet on the ground and quits getting the church fathers riled up. Maybe it'd help if the deacons knocked him down a peg or two so he can see how we've always done things, I dunno.

"OK, that's it for me. Amen."

Likeable Quote

Jacob Bronowski - "The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation."

What is an Optimist?

-from today's Take Time to Laugh Department:

An optimist is someone who, regardless of their situation or circumstances, can't help but smile and announce to the world, "So far so good."

:-) Enjoy .....

Are you a Southern Baptist, or what?

My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas"; still another, "I follow Christ."

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? - 1 Corinthians 1:11-13

What's wrong with kids now days?

John King was the world's youngest pirate.

According to Wiki, King "joined the crew of Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy while still a juvenile, and is the youngest known pirate on record.

"On November 9, 1716, Bellamy and his crew, sailing the sloop Mary Anne (or Marianne), attacked and captured the Antiguan sloop Bonetta, which was then en route from Antigua to Jamaica. John King, then aged between eight and eleven, was a passenger on the Bonetta. According to Abijah Savage, the Bonetta's commander, the pirates looted the ship for 15 days, during which time King demanded to join Bellamy's crew. "(F)ar from being forced or compelled (to join)," Savage wrote in his report, "he declared he would kill himself if he was restrained, and even threatened his Mother, who was then on board as a passenger."

Related:
Remains Identified as a boy pirate - Boston.com
The Littlest Pirate - unmuseum.org

On Woooooo! Tube

-from Reuters.com

Underground Drinks Party Ends in Mayhem

By Paul Majendie

LONDON (Reuters) - Police arrested 17 people and had to close six London Underground stations after a party involving thousands of revelers to mark the last day of drinking alcohol on the tube turned ugly.

Six assaults were reported on underground rail staff and police. Several damaged trains had to be withdrawn from service on a night of mayhem that had been dubbed "Last Round on the Underground" by revelers.

The festivities were at first good-natured with partygoers wearing fancy dress as they swigged beer and wine, dancing and singing in the railway carriages.

But police moved in when the mood turned sour and fighting erupted, spoiling what officers had called "a fun event."

The London transport ban on alcohol is designed to make buses, tubes and trains safer for the public but unions fear staff could be put in greater danger when they have to confront those breaking the ban.

tvitter

I tried twittering, really I did, but never managed to quite get a "feel" for what the essence of twittering is all about. (But then I felt supremely confident that HD DVD was gonna triumph all over Blu-Ray, and we see how that turned out. So there.)

-- -- --
But ... but when no one's twittering, don't you wonder what all your friends are watching- at that instant- on TV? See that's what we need tvitter for.

Here's my week at a glance:

Keen Eddie Today 2:30PM 307 SLTH
Faces of Earth Mon 6/2 8:00PM 284 SCI
Extreme Marksmen Mon 6/2 9:00PM 269 HIST
Ancient Asteroid Mon 6/2 11:00PM 276 NGC
Manual Tune Wed 6/4 9:00 PM 269 HIST




If tvitter really existed, I'd likely call mine Notes from the Blue Screen.